Tools, Dials & unexpected Levers

Children

The Glabru lives in the attic, he enters at night and make pens ink on stuffs and he torns notebooks rip rip, he puts nails or snails in the shoes and makes knots in woolballs, picks an ember in the fire and puts it on the carpet. He goes also in the kitchen, sours the milk or butter, spoils fruits by putting his fingers into them and spits frog’s spit into the soup.

At night some children sometimes hear the Glabru calling the other Glabrus in other houses with a owly oooh oooh, then they’re talking sitting in a row on a branch they talk about naugthies and sillies to make, and they tell each other the name of kids to teasebother.

Some days things are lost, they break, and the rain falls when it shouldn’t, and stuff trips you and you bang your head on wood beams.

When a Glabru comes noboby hears it but only a few little girls who can protect others with this rhyme :

Like this:

Kids like to be entertained. As a teacher, as a storyteller, or as a parent sometimes, you need to “get their attention”. Yes, maybe, to be a teacher is to be an actor?

In Fanny & Alexander, a movie by Ingmar Bergman, a worn chair is told by the father into the world’s most valuable armchair to a doubtful bunch of kids. Power of imagination! You see sparks in their eyes…

When he wants to destroy the “throne”, at the end of the scene, the kids SCREAM!

BUT ALSO

Kids know they are entertained, but they play the game. It then becomes the essence of entertainment : Cessation of the doubt – or suspension of disbelief. They know you’re embarking them, but they like it. They dive into your story.

It’s not an “as if” attitude! It’s a “Oh I’ll be entertained!”. It’s an openness. They go for it.

Once they’re in your story, they follow, they’re happy.

BUT ALSO

Kids are smart. So… in one second, you can bring them back to reality, you can waltz between the terrible witch, Dorothy, and… yourself back.

My opinion here is it’s smart to use this intelligence, to be aware of it.

They believe you, they don’t want you to burn the magic golden throne, but at the same time, they know.

The tango between “You’re in the dream of the story” and “You’re aware I’m an adult playing with your mind” is an elevation process.

Girls & boys have to fight their father & mother, but in a different way.

Girls have to fight their mother. They say “I won’t be like her”.

Boys have to kill their father. They say “I’ll beat him, I’ll be better”.

The crossed thing is all about love. Boys love their mother and girls love their dad, that’s it. Boys are weak, they just love. Girls find a husband like dad (in order to repair him), or the opposite of him (to feel secure at least – or challenged?).

My dad was great. He lost his father and grand-father at war. He was a sensitive person, and as a young man he was an actor and a singer. I thank him because of his curiosity, and because he built up a great pack of shelves : books. A treasure for me!

I think he’s been strongly affected by disillusions of life, and depression hit him deeply, for years. He died two years ago.

In a way he made me : I am a curious person, am interested in classic cinema, psychology, philosophy, literature and arts, and I’ve even been a musician once, for theater and dance.

In a way I prolonged what he began but in other ways. I have many more books and I never really stopped exploring culture. I made 2 CDs for dancers – but I stopped composing music. I let go things without bitterness. I just kept this : I stayed a romantic, I suppose… I believed in things…

At one moment, though, you feel, you have to feel the fight, the fatherness (I know it’s fatherhood, but I choose fatherness) becomes toxic. You watch him and his tastes and you’re like : OMG, NO.

It’s a whole story, and there are many ways to live it : you can cut all bonds (or your parents can do it for you if your family’s cursed), you can do “as if” and see them the less possible, you can just argue, etc… All of it, almost, becomes impossible. You have to overtake something, right?

At one moment, YOU become a father, a mother :

If you’re a normal person, you won’t even notice that your child is now a teenager then an adult judging you. You’re strong, and sure, and you play the “Bahhh the younglings they understand nothing”.

If you’re aware, that’s terrible : you see this in their eyes. Now, you ARE uncool and unfashionable. Then they begin to despise you, to fight, to hate your terrible music tastes, and your movies stink. Good to you : that’s how it goes!

Their turn, soon.

Thanks for reading!

Yes it’s me on the left. And I’m on the left of the first photography and in yellow on the last…

But many studies showed something : there shouldn’t be a single minutes of “screens” time before the age of 3. And no tablet before 6.

Child development is a big thing. They have to grow so many aspects! TV before 3 and tablets before 6 is messing with motor and language development, socialization skills and empathy.

I talked many times with speech pathologists who say that screens (TV all the time, tablets for preschooler) are a disaster. And they told me it’s becoming a real problem today…

And also this : “High exposure to background TV has been found to negatively affect language use and acquisition, attention, cognitive development and executive function in children younger than 5 years”

In France, one man (Serge Tisseron) studied that for years. He talks about the rule of 3-6-9-12

Like this:

We live in words, our intelligence plays with them constantly. We dialog with them (as good tools!), we think in words and images. So much that it can become a problem. Philosophers (who said Wittgenstein?) thought a lot about this. And we books-lovers like to think about the limitation of our world with words. Poets and photographers (and others) try to evoke “richer” things, moods that can not be completely defined with words – which simplify reality. Words are not enough, and the world (us included) is moving

I talk sometimes with people who work with poor people, homeless or living in a very poor condition. Educators, teachers in special schools, or unpaid helpers who give a few hours from time to time, volunteers.

One of them, a former philosophy teacher, lives in my street. A few days ago she told me she met a little boy who didn’t speak. Not a word, ever : mute. She said this kid had been well taken cared of, but no one was speaking to him.

So she stayed around, for months, speaking to him, reading him stories, never asking for anything. Like “When I come, I’m with you, that’s it”. Like nourishing him with words.

Months later, a morning, she said the kid watched her, pointed out something in a book, and said : “C’est bleu !”.